Raygan Kelly

One of my favorite things about Twitter is the way that interesting trends seem to emerge from nowhere. One day, everyone will be twittering in the form of haiku, another day everyone is starts listing their favorite album and why… that sort of thing.

One trend that emerged in the last couple of days and which I thought was particularly funny has been people twittering fake animal facts. I have no idea how this started, but there have been some great examples. I’ll list a few of my favorites:

• #fakeanimalfacts badgers always point north

• #fakeanimalfacts One penguin is actually made up of millions of tiny penguins clumped together

• #fakeanimalfacts – in spite of their size, barn owls are huge.

• #fakeanimalfacts the differences between African and Indian elephants are purely subjective.

• #fakeanimalfacts Armadillos can only breed by being run over by motor vehicles, causing them to explode spores over the surrounding area

• The Weimaraner was originally bred by the Nazis for hunting ghosts. #fakeanimalfacts

• #fakeanimalfacts – in spite of dolphins being regarded as ‘intelligent’ creatures, most of them can’t even walk.

• Owls dont weigh anything. #fakeanimalfacts

You might notice that all of these include the text #fakeanimalfacts. This is what’s called a Hash Tag on Twitter; it’s specially included to make your tweet part of a global discussion on a topic, so that they’re all easily searched for. Here’s the current search page for more #FakeAnimalFacts.

I couldn’t help adding my own fact to this trend. Here it is:

• In the wild, certain primate species have been observed to play an organized sport simmilar to bocce ball. #fakeanimalfacts